As of today, Saturday, August 14th 2010, I am ready to announce my very first foray into Wii developing: The Prophecy! The game is developed by me with the aid of ThatOtherDev doing the programming.

We are talking a game for Wii Homebrew here, classic NES/SNES Castlevania style. If you dont know anything about what a Castlevania does, look no further than YouTube.

Now, the game is set in your typical Castlevania fashion. Evil vampire lord terrorizes people, young heroine sets out to defeat him. Nothing spectacular.

What is different here are the enhanced gameplay parts. First, gone is the tedious staircase climbing. You can walk on stairs the same way you walk on the floor. You can jump on and off at your liking, like in the modern 2D Castlevania games.

You can also whip upwards and, while in midair, downwards. We also have a dialogue system set up for story progession. Each of the 6 stages has two checkpoints in case you die. Instead of sub weapons or whip upgrades (common in Castlevania) I opted for a different approach: Force Gems.

A Force Gem basically updates your whip with sub weapons. That means that for instance a red crystal adds the power of fire to your whip. you can then shoot fireballs. A blue crystal adds the power of ice to your whip. Weaker enemies will be frozen, and bigger enemies will be slowed down when hit with this whip.
Another gem adds poison to your whip and so forth. There are three types of Gems with three powerups each, and the main whip, bringing it to a total of ten different whip features.

The game will feature a full blown musical score. It will not be chiptune based or midi. Also, the game is displayed in glorious 640*480 resolution, features multiple graphical layers, alternate paths during the levels and some pretty nice bosses.

As for now, have a look at those early screenshots from the first three stages. Check back here for updates!